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Sunday, 10 April 2016

Fourth Sunday of Great Lent - St John Climacus, Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, 10th April 2016

One of the strands of the Gospel readings through Lent and
into the Fifty Days after Pascha is the power of Christ faced with our
limitations and not so much altering our condition as making humanity transcend
it.

Here is the map of the journey we are on. Before Lent we
have the Pharisee (Tenth Sunday before Pascha: Luke 18.10-14) and the Prodigal
Son (Ninth Sunday: Luke 15.11-32) who cannot recognise how threadbare is their
own sense of entitlement and self-sufficiency. Then we have Nathanael who
cannot see anything good in the Nazarene until the Nazarene sees something good
in him (Sunday of Orthodoxy, First of Great Lent: John 1.43-51). Then we have the
paralysed man let down through the roof in Capernaum to be healed by Jesus, whereupon
Jesus makes him stands on his feet by the power of forgiveness - a dazzling
foretelling of Christ’s own descent from the Cross, His burial and resurrection
and all that they will achieve (Second Sunday of Great Lent: Mark2.1-12). After
Good Friday and Pascha, we will hear again of the reservations and then the
faith of St Thomas (Sunday of St Thomas, First after Pascha: John 20.19-31),
the astonished blindness of St Mary Magdalen upon finding in the Empty Tomb
“The Young Man Sitting on the Right Clothed in White”, not recognising before
her the Angel of “The Forever Young One Who is Risen and Enthroned at His Father’s
Right in Glory” in the Holy Trinity (Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, Second
after Easter: Mark 15.43-47 & 16.1-8). Then we will hear of another
paralysed person whose human impediments will be overcome at the Pool of
Bethsaida by the power of faith and forgiveness, both coming from God in Christ
(Sunday of the Paralytic, Third after Easter: John 5.1-15). We will hear, too,
of the woman at the well in Samaria with an answer for everything, until Jesus
plays back to her the truth about herself - until she sees herself as Jesus
sees her, a person made for the worship and love of God (Sunday of the
Samaritan Woman, Fourth after Easter: John 4.5-42). Then the man born blind
will trust Jesus’ directions to bathe at the Pool of Siloam, and let Jesus
touch him, so that the first thing he sees is not the physical world he is
never beheld before, but the Man from God whom he falls down before and
worships (Sunday of the Man Born Blind, Fifth after Easter:John 9.1-38). This will bring us to our own
encounter with the Lord at His Ascension, and then St John’s explanation
(Sunday of Pentecost:John 7.37-52,8.12)
that the Christ Who came from Bethlehem, was the Light Who dispelled the
darkness of humanity in Galilee, before all was perfected in the glorification
that took place in Jerusalem – the Cross, the Tomb, the Rising from the dead to
the new Jerusalem out of which He will pour the rivers of living water: no more
pools, wells, Galilees and Jordans, but the Holy Spirit Himself.

It is for us to identify with each of these people, each of
these scenes and each of these events. It is for us to place ourselves within
them, and see ourselves as we are seen by Christ. We go on a journey thus from
conceit and self-pity, from lack of lively faith and dynamic discipleship, from
inability to perceive what is standing before us, from self-deception and
wounded pride. Along the way, we are warned to look for the signals of Christ
coming His Kingdom, its majesty hidden in plain sight (you might say) in the
realities around us (Meatfare Saturday, Luke 21,8-9, 25-27, 33-36). We are told
to be discerning about ourselves and our true dispositions, and how Christ
makes himself appear in our midst – sheep or goat, King or outcast? Which is
it, and who like Him are we supposed to be (Meatfare Sunday, the Eighth before
Pascha:Matthew 25.31-46)? We are told
to be forgivers if we expect to be forgiven, and to pile up treasures in heaven
and not here (Cheesefare Sunday, the Seventh before Pascha:Matthew 6.14-21). The greatest treasure, we
come to learn is the beam of the Cross that we will heave up onto our shoulders
and lose everything else, but not that (Sunday of the Holy Cross, Third of
Great Lent: Mark 8. 34-39). We will realise that like the sons of Zebedee we
have nothing to say other than that, yes, we are prepared to drink the cup that
Jesus drinks, and, yes, to seek for ourselves His baptism into death’s unknown
(Fifth Sunday of Lent: Mark 10.32-45). We too will end with seeing Christ at
the point of completing His work, realising that we are the ones who have been
kept by the Lord and not been lost - learning every step of the way to keep to
His word, until we see everything else fall away and what is liberated is the
joy (Sunday of the Fathers, Fifth after Pascha: John 17.1-13).

The point we have reached today is the experience of the
young man overwhelmed by a spirit that makes him undergo seizures, taking away
his ability to speak and hear (Fourth Sunday of Great Lent: Mark 9.16-30). To
the father and his family, this is the work of an unclean spirit, alien to the
boy’s wellbeing and survival. We may recognise his symptoms as possible
epilepsy, but this is not to explain away the story. What Jesus reveals to us
in this, and in all the stories and words He uses, is that inevitably we come
up against our shortcomings and our limitations, not least the aspects of our
personal existence and factors surrounding our lives over which we have no
control. We meet them in our sin, and our pride, in their impotence. We our
thwarted by them in the limits to the capacity of our bodies, to the limits
placed on our egos, our ability to get our own way, and to our never-fully
satisfied passions and appetites. We are frustrated, too, by the forcefulness
of others, their egos and neediness, their sin and worldliness; and we are not
above returning the selfishness. We are confronted, too, by the oppression of
intangible forces, whether they come from deep-rooted systems and habits of
injustice in the world and how it works, or the influences of whole societies
and cultures, or the powers at work in life and nature that we cannot see,
still less understand.Jesus is pointing
out to His disciples that the adversity of concrete, material living is
inseparable from the world of the spiritual. It is not that something wrong
with our spiritual lives shows up in an effect on our physical bearings and
experience, although this can sometimes be true. Jesus is telling us something
much deeper than that. Soul and body are neither divided compartments in life,
not operate on different planes.He is
saying that it is all of a piece – we humans are both physical and spiritual,
and we must live lives both in the world and in the Kingdom of the Spirit.

Seeing that we are not the masters that we imagine ourselves
to be in our own lives, let along the world where we seek to prevail, what are
we do? We do not have complete freedom, so are we are to enslave ourselves to
the world? We imagine ourselves to be fine and righteous, and yet cannot see we
need to seek forgiveness; so do we resign ourselves to self-satisfaction or
serial imperfection? We do not recognise the spiritual side of life and we trust
what we can hold onto rather than what it staring us in the face, as heaven
accosts us in the eyes and mouth and hands of its Only Son. So is all we have to
be mournful at what we have missed out, defeated by finding out our lowly place
in the scheme of things? Or do we do take the journey to come to the light, to
know the power of Christ’s forgiveness at work in us, to “keep to His word” and
to let all else fall away so that what stands free at last is His own joy?
(John 17, Fifth Sunday after Pascha)

To act as our own master is futile as well as misleading and
even dangerous. But, with all our limitations and shortcomings, to place all
that we are, everything that has formed us, good and adverse, any gift or
aptitude that we have, all our personality, our incomplete faith but our
instinctive adoration at the service of the Master Himself, this is the
breakthrough to humanity that He came to bring about. St Paul says that dying
to sin we are alive to God (Romans 6.11). Jesus Himself tells us to pray that
the Kingdom will come not in some next world or other, but on earth as it is in
heaven (Matthew 6.10). So what, says Christ, if the Kingdom can come not just
as a phenomenon on earth but as the joy in people, His own joy at coming to the
Father? (John 17.13)

Today we recall St John Climacus, author of “The Ladder of
Virtues”. In the icon portraying the spiritual path he set out, you will see
the ascent of the Christ-seeking soul, step by painstaking step. Some souls you
will see have deceived themselves and fall down, while others attain to the
Divine. Jesus promised Nathanael that he would see that Christ is the Ladder on
which the ascent to heaven is made (Sunday of Orthodoxy, John 1.51). But He
also says that the angels who conduct us to God by ascending also descend. The
Light that we look up for also enters down to shine into our darkness. It is
not overwhelmed by sin and human shortcoming, but pierces it, transfigures it –
makes it look different from how it appears, to make it look like what it truly
is designed to be, patterned on the Son of Man.

For as Christ is divine and became human, so we who are
human become like Him. Human and spiritual, material and filled with God
because of His image within us, we live even now the resurrection. Though dead
in one dimension, in reality our lives are hidden with Christ in God
(Colossian3.3). Here the Spirit flows His living waters through our hearts (John
7.38, Sunday of Pentecost), so that what we were is washed away by what we shall
become.

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